The effect of the orders on the encampment were immediate and intense. As soon as Matei turned from them, indicating that his speech was at an end, folk began streaming back out of the longhouse. Voices rose again until the sound of the mingled conversations put Mhera in mind of the sea: restless, agitated.

Aun turned to her. "Mhera, I must go speak with Macon. You may go back to the infirmary if you wish."

"I need to speak to Matei," Mhera said. She herself felt agitated; Matei's plan had wakened in her a deep sense of foreboding. She was uneasy, and she could not focus her thoughts.

"Very well. I'll look for you back at the infirmary."

Mhera felt at first like she couldn't move. She reached out to place a hand on the wall. Four rebel camps, all of them kept secret from one another. Each of them likely to pick up new folk on the way. Growing. A disease in her uncle's empire. And she? Where would she go? Matei had not said what he would do.

Matei was still standing with the other rebel leaders. He was listening to something Tryn was saying. Farra had come up to the group, and he was absently stroking her ears, an attention she appeared to receive grudgingly. Finally, Matei spoke a few words and clapped each of his council members on the shoulder. They parted, the four others moving toward the door, weaving their ways through the press of people still waiting for their turn to pass out of the longhouse. Farra padded at Uachi's side.

Matei raked a hand back through his loose hair, watching them go with a grim expression.

Mhera went to him. "And us? Where do we go?" she asked.

The rebel turned to her; he did not smile. "We will go where we're needed most," he said. "I haven't yet decided."

She twisted her hands together tightly. Anxiety quickened her pulse; she was aware of it, the beat of it, in her fingertips. "Matei ... this morning ... this morning we parted in peace."

He raised his brows, waiting for her to go on.

"Take me home. Take me to Karelin." Mhera looked up at him. In that moment, it seemed to be the most important thing she would ever do, would ever ask: to leave Hanpe. Her mind was foggy with the fear that something was terribly wrong—something beyond her presence there, something beyond all she had suffered. "Please. Please don't make me go with you."

Matei looked down at her for a moment. She saw his shoulders rise and fall with his breath; she saw his eyes flick over her face, lingering as they had before on the healing bruise, then glancing down to her nervous hands, then away. She saw his hand tighten into a fist at his side and relax again.

"Mhera, don't," he said. There was a warning in his voice.

She did not heed it. "Please, Matei, please don't take me with you, please send me home. Please, show me this kindness. Let me go." She willed herself to stay calm.

"Mhera, let this be the only time you ask this of me," he said, "and the only time I must tell you no."

She watched his fingers curl into a fist again and felt as if he were crushing her living heart in his hand. "Please," she whispered.

"Mhera, I told you before."

She closed her eyes against the burning tears, swallowing. Goddess, let me keep a hold on myself. Let me not cry in front of this man again. "You said we could be parted in peace."

"But still, we are bound. Look at me."

She opened her eyes and looked up at his face, not wanting to see the truth there. She could see that he was reining in his emotions, his anger.

"We are together until the end, Mhera. Until death. That we can walk around a city separately does not change that. That you might travel to a different place does not change that. Could you go home?" He shrugged, shaking his head. "I—I don't know. Maybe."

"How can you not know? You made it happen!"

"This is likely the first blood-binding in an age. As I told you, we are learning, uncovering things our people forgot generations ago. I'm sorry if the details of the binding are fuzzy—it is not something one can practice and perfect." The edge was coming back into his voice. "Even if I could take you home, I would not. You have been among us now, you've seen things here, and you know now what we intend to do to escape your thrice-damned uncle. Do you expect me to send you home? You would run to him and fling yourself at the Corpsemaker's feet and tell him everything."

"I won't," she said, wanting also to say, Don't call him that—don't call Uncle that horrible lie of a name.

The king of the rebels smiled then, and it was a bitter smile. "You're a terrible liar, Mhera. And selfish. That you would ask this thing of me now, now that you have seen the faces of these people and know whose lives you risk ..." Anger made his voice tremble. He drew a breath and shook his head, speaking with forced calm. "I will not speak of this again. Now go. I haven't the time to talk to you now. There are preparations to make."

Mhera turned from him and walked with haste toward the door. She wanted just to be away from him, to be alone with her pain. The longhouse was empty now except for the cooks and Aun, who was speaking to Macon over by the oven.

A moment later, when Mhera landed hard on her hands and knees, gasping for breath around the ugly, familiar pain, she thought: I should have known. I should not have asked. Tears blurred her vision. She lowered her head, hitching in another ragged breath, and sobbed.

"Nelae take you, you wretched woman!" Matei shouted from behind her.

Mhera heard Aun gasp at the curse. She turned her head and looked back over her shoulder to see Matei standing with a hand braced against a table, clutching the front of his tunic. His face was a snarl.

Before Mhera knew that Aun had come, she felt the healer's gentle hands on her upper arms, pulling her to her feet. Mhera could not stand upright; she hunched over, shaking with the pain.

"What happened, Mhera?" Aun searched Mhera's face, as if checking for new bruises.

"A quarrel," Mhera replied, and she began to sob.

...

Later that afternoon, Mhera sat on the ground at the back of the council house, holding a cup of water between hands that seemed not to feel it. It was a pretty day, but in the shadows behind the building, it was chill.

Matei was inside. Sitting out of doors, as close to the wall as she could, Mhera felt like a dog on a chain. She had wanted to go back to the infirmary with Aun to help her take stock of her medicines, but Matei had been swept up in the business of the encampment and there was no choice but to go with him to the council house now that their uneasy peace had broken. He had, at least, permitted her to stay outside—he'd seemed rather glad of it, in fact.

Although there were fewer of them away from the main road, Mhera could see some of the folk of Hanpe moving back and forth with a new urgency in their steps. She had not at first credited the idea that an entire city could move at all, let alone as quickly as Matei seemed to wish them to. But now, seeing men and women scurrying about the business of tallying, packing, and planning, she began to think it was possible.

And I will go with them, I know not where, Mhera thought. To the Giant's Back Mountains in the west of Penrua? To the caves Matei had mentioned? Far south, to the continent of Narr? It was also under her uncle's dominion, but so foreign and mysterious that it was another world to her. The lands under the empire were infinite in their variety, and it scared her to think that someone might close his eyes and put his finger on a map, deciding where she would live for ... well, for who knew how long.

Mhera took a sip of water and then looked down into the cup between her hands. She closed her eyes as soon as she saw her reflected face, knowing it wasn't safe.

But almost as if the glimpse of her reflected face had brought it on, she felt a strange need to look. An urgency.

She recalled the vision of the glowing eyes, the water, the books, the rope. She recalled the vision of the mill. Although Mhera could not know what had come of all the letters the abbess had written to the emperor describing her visions, she knew that much of the time her visions showed true things: things that had happened, or things that were to come.

If she looked, would she see mountains? Plains? Strange faces in a land far away?

She opened her eyes to look around her. Those few folk who passed by this side of the council house were busy. Few spared her even a glance.

Mhera contemplated for a moment, resting her hand over the rim of the cup. Then she moved it away and looked down.

Her reflection was dim. She reached up to smooth a stray wisp of hair back from her brow, and then she touched the dark place on her cheek where she could see the shadow of a healing bruise in the colorless image of her face.

Letting her hand fall to hold the cup again, Mhera unfocused her gaze and began to breathe slowly and steadily, calming her mind. She released the chill she felt sitting in shadow on the late summer day. She released her anxiety about what would happen the next day, and the next. She released, as best she could, her defeat and pain over Matei's refusal to consider her plea to go home. She gazed.

And, after what seemed like a small eternity of waiting, she Saw.

There is a child walking before me, holding her mother's hand. She pauses and turns to look back at me, and as she does, a fog creeps over the settlement. It wreaths through the branches, curling like smoke. No: it is smoke; I smell it, acrid and choking. I hear the child's voice from beyond a veil of gray: "Mama, who is she?"

The longhouse is aflame. "No one, sweet," says the mother, and I cannot see her face, but beyond her, I see a man standing in a long robe, a man holding a staff that drips blood over his fingers. There is fire all around, hellish light in the night-dark scene. Screaming. Burning. I see roses, roses everywhere. Their footsteps are heavy on the earth, and there are hundreds of them.

Something glimmers, drawing my eye. I turn and look back. The road stretches through the trees, over the fields, back all the way to the white beacon of the Holy City, and the glimmer is the firelight glancing off its viscous surface. When I look down, I see the dark stain of it seeping into the hem of my dress.

It is a river of blood, and the dead lie scattered, and the robed man watches all with hooded eyes ...

The sound of her own rasping breath brought Mhera back to herself from the vision. She jerked her hands away from the cup and it spilled, darkening the red skirt she wore like a stain of fresh blood.

She was halfway to her feet, ready to run, when she realized where she was. A bird chirped somewhere; she looked and saw the tiny creature on a nearby roof. She smelled the grass, felt the coolness of the shade. There was no fire, no smoke.

She closed her eyes, her head swimming with the memory of the dark vision. She leaned back against the longhouse wall. She had Seen the fall of Hanpe; she knew it, knew it without a single doubt.

The empire would come; they would burn the rebel city to the ground, and Penrua would be safe, perhaps once and for all.

But how could they come? How could they come in time? The entire camp was astir with preparations for their escape. They'd divide and spread out across the continent, an evil stain. The empire could never reach them before they fled, not from so far away.

But if they could ... if they could travel as quickly as the Arcborn, by way of magic, by way of a road of blood ...

Mhera recalled the child in the vision, screaming. She recalled the children she had seen in the longhouse, too young yet to bear the marke, too young for such a dreadful, bloody fate. Would they be spared?

Koreti had not been spared. Mhera put her hands over her face, remembering: she remembered how he had been in her visions, for she had Seen him many times: beaten beyond recognition, his head pulled back cruelly, his throat ready for the kiss of the blade. Sometimes she had watched and had Seen the blade slide across his throat, Seen his lifeblood pooling on the filthy ground, Seen his fear and his pain.

Matei's words from the day before came unbidden into her mind: Look at this woman and blame her for this. Look into her eyes and hold her accountable for the sins of her kin.

Matei had not killed Koreti. Perhaps the ones who had were here in this place, those who had followed Rhodana's orders and killed a child.

But for all his cruelty toward her, Matei had defended Mhera. He only needed her alive, but he had told them all in no uncertain terms that she went under his protection. And Aun had welcomed her readily, with true kindness, even knowing who she was. Could she condemn Aun to such a fate?

Mhera remembered her vision of the mill. Innocent enough, it had seemed, but it had led to Rhodana's capture—a victory for her family, for the realm. But to hear the rebels speak of it, many more had died that day.

She had blood on her hands. She knew it. And as much as she hated these evil folk, she did not relish the thought of what had happened to their friends and their family. She was not happy for the part she had played.

Could she do it again—this time by staying silent?